By Richard Lee

Before there was Saturday Night Live, there was a memo. 

The memo was written by a top NBC executive, suggesting a new program to invigorate the 11:30 p.m. Saturday slot that was occupied by reruns of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. 

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Bob Woodward, in his 1984 book about John Belushi, used the memo to describe the origins of SNL, which is NBC is celebrating tonight to mark 50 years of the program. 

Woodward didn’t simply paste the contents of the document into the book. Using basic journalism techniques, he painted a picture. Here’s how:

The top part of a memo usually contains the date it was written, the name of the person it’s going to and the subject of the document. That was a start.

The top also contains the name of the person who wrote the memo. In this case, the author was Herbert S. Schlosser, who at the time was president of NBC. It probably was not too difficult to learn where the office of an executive of Schlosser’s stature was located. 

With these simple details, Woodward took readers into the start of the process that led to the creation of SNL: 

On February 11, 1975, NBC President Herbert S. Schlosser was in his sixth-floor office in the RCA Building in New York, preparing a memo to the head of NBC television.

Next, he added context, explaining why NBC was seeking a new show: 

The network had been filling its 10:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. slot on Saturday night with Johnny Carson reruns. They were stale, and the overexposure wasn’t helping the regular weeknight show. They needed a show that would make people come home early to watch television on Saturday night.

Then, with the stage set for the actual memo, he gave us the details: 

“I would like a thoroughgoing analysis done on a new program concept called ‘Saturday Night.’…[It] should originate from the RCA Building in New York City, if possible live…It should be young and bright. It should have a distinctive look, a distinctive set and a distinctive sound. We should attempt to use the show to develop the new television personalities…and hire a producer who can do it for the parameters we establish.”

What Woodward did here is not the type of stuff that will bring down a president, but to borrow a phrase from Lin-Manuel Miranda, it’s a good example of how a writer can methodically tell a story that takes the reader into the room where it happened. 

Richard Lee, executive director of the Jandoli Institute, is a former music journalist who often writes about the intersection of music and current events. 

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